I leave early for the cemetery, to set up before others arrive. My van is filled with folding chairs, rolled-up plastic carpeting, and flowers, most left over from the viewing, to arrange around the burial site. Robert is at the back of his mother’s driveway, stacking rolls of wire mesh. I drive past slowly. He sees me but turns back to his work.
What I’m beginning to understand is how lonely I’ve been, a loneliness I’d gotten used to, a way of living that—after this brief glimpse into the possibility of a different life—I can no longer bear.
I cross the highway, then a dried-up creek, and finally, two cattle guards. The burial ground is filled with a hodgepodge of markers—large headstones with professional etching ordered through our catalogs, but mostly a variety of cheaper, more creative markers from when the town had just come into being. There are crosses made of two-by-fours, license plates, and even sections of the highway’s guardrail with names scored into them.
I have always loved the near-perfect square Pop and I have made of this space, marked by a chain-link fence to keep out the cattle. When I try to get out of my van, the wind leans against the door. I push too hard, and the door slaps into the fence. A mule deer, spooked by the noise, scurries over a hill.
Cold nips at my neck, and I wish I’d worn a hat. I can smell the snowstorm on its way. Since I was a little girl I used to come here regularly in high boots, my father nearby with a shovel and a shotgun, to clear the field of sagebrush and rattlesnakes. He used to shoot the snakes and hang them, still twitching, over the fence. Later, when he was finished with his work, he’d cut off the rattles, which I would save in an old cigar box. I still keep that box full of rattles in a kitchen drawer, behind the matches.
What always struck me about clearing out the sage, rabbitbrush, and greasewood was how the silvery green of new growth would return so quickly. It’s as if the land can’t sustain a human imprint for long and any evidence is gone in a season.
Across the cemetery, there are unmelted mounds from the last snowfall and taller drifts at the windiest corner. Pop and I should have come yesterday with our shovels to clear a level path for the elderly, who can lose their footing.
In this field, you can see the history of our town—the poor man’s burials, the many graves for stillborn and young children, the entire Flint family who died in the Great Rimrock Fire, and the tattered basketball jersey above Eddie Golden’s headstone.
Has Robert visited his brother’s grave? Has he ever sat here and talked helplessly to a stone? I wonder if I will ever know, if we’ll speak again.
I pick up pieces of trash and straighten the faded plastic wreaths. On the western corner, the only place in this field that isn’t flat, the stones of the Heesacker brothers—Charlie and Sam—slip closer and closer together with each rain as if, even after death, they need to lean their heads together and gossip. I pluck a weed from their shared plot.
I am procrastinating, always shy about visiting my mother.
We keep her grave nice, a rare bush planted and watered beside it, the overgrowth cut back. The stone’s inscription, loving wife and mother, feels like Pop’s fantasy since she only knew me as something fat in her belly.
When I was younger, teachers tried to comfort me on the days mothers were invited to class to help make gingerbread houses or other holiday projects. And I tried to tell them I was fine. That I didn’t grow up without. My father taught me so much, how to be self-sufficient and unafraid of hard work. “If you think for a minute that I missed out on a woman’s touch,” I once told a teacher, “look how I spend entire days playing makeup and dress-up.”
I wanted so badly for a teacher to laugh at my funeral humor. I wanted to push back against pity, against the idea that I’d turned out stunted and strange.
But the truth is, I always felt the empty space when I saw girls browsing through their mother’s pocketbooks, reaching for scented lotions and compacts that opened up to little mirrors and pressed powder. And I do wonder, though I insist to Pop that I don’t, how our family might have been different if she’d remained with us. If I’d had memories of my mother telling me about menstrual cycles, lending me her sweater or earrings, waiting up till I got home safe. I wonder if I would be better at making friends, at finding love. I wonder what she’d say if I told her about Robert.
Sometimes I try to imagine my mother’s hands on me through her belly, the sound and vibration of her voice when I floated inside her womb, wondering if anything about that brief time we had together is still with me.
I tuck my hands into my armpits. I always feel silly after visiting my mother’s grave, wishing we weren’t strangers. Wishing I had a single memory of her instead of standing here, dumb.